Profiling the Christian youth today
This is just a rough sketch to capture an emerging disturbing trend among Christian youth today. This is like an exercise in case study. It's not to give a typical picture, but rather to detect a disquieting tendency.
The details are culled from many sources who happen to voice out more or less similar or common impressions and perceptions regarding the lives of many Christian youth today.
Let's call the protagonist John Paul, a junior Law student, who comes from a good Christian family and studies in a Catholic university. He practices his faith, does some prayers, goes to Sunday Mass, etc.
He struggles to live the virtues, and meets more or less the same difficulties common among his peers and the pressures typical of the environment he circulates in. He goes to spiritual direction with a priest.
The problem is that in spite of his good background, he is stuck in his spiritual life. He finds hardly any reason to grow more in his spiritual life. He is lukewarm in his apostolate. He considers the faith as good, but rather complex, hard and problematic when made to impact with his friends.
It's a common phenomenon these days. Many like John Paul do not hide their religion and can go through the usual routine of spiritual practices, but they have no drive to go any further.
A closer scrutiny would reveal that the youth like John Paul are very intellectually capable. They yearn for wider cultural knowledge, and thus expose themselves almost indiscriminatingly to all sorts of materials, including those with clearly atheistic and purely naturalistic ideological viewpoints.
In short, with a Christian life that is not yet well grounded and a Christian formation that is not yet systematically established, they dare to swim in an ocean of information, pretty much left to their own devices.
Compounding the problem is their attitude that they can manage to sort out things by themselves. They tend to resent to be guided. They are suspicious and distrusting of those with clear authority and expertise over the matter. Consulting them would be like giving away their freedom.
Their Christianity is more of a cultural and social legacy inherited from their parents and society in general, than of a personal conviction capable of having a consistent view before all sorts of questions and issues in life. It has become an external formal cover without the genuine substance inside.
They cannot bring their faith to bear on these questions and issues. Much less can they defend it when it is put into question. They can arrive at that point where their faith can be a source of embarrassment to them. They can consider it irrelevant and out of touch with reality.
What to do in this kind of situation is indeed a big challenge. I certainly would like that in spite of these conditions, everything has to be done to keep direct personal contact with such youth.
If possible, the spiritual direction has to be kept. There's a high probability that the problem is caused more by some moral failures than an intellectual inability to reconcile faith with reason. In this situation, what has to be done more is to show compassion and patience, without letting up on rational explanations.
Together with that, a more thorough and sustained effort at apologetics, or explaining the faith in the context of reason, science and other human fields of knowledge, should be done.
There's no reason to think that the faith cannot stand rational or scientific scrutiny. In fact, it's the reverse. It's the faith that gives meaning and direction to our human knowledge.
It would be good to bring out to public notice many good Christian authors whose work certainly can have great impact on the minds of the young ones. I have no doubt they can help dispel the confusion, doubts and errors in matters of faith and morals floating loosely in society today.
Of course, on the part of elders, teachers and those with certain authority and competence on the matter—especially the clergy—a more consistent lifestyle is not only a must but also should be made more public, echoing St. Paul's "Be imitators of me, as I am an imitator of Christ."
This is what is needed these days!
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@hotmail.com)